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Fevered metropolis: epidemic disease and isolation in Victorian London

FEVERED METROPOLIS:
EPIDEMIC DISEASE AND ISOLATION IN VICTORIAN LONDON.
by
Matthew L. Newsom Kerr
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Matthew L. Newsom Kerr

Fevered Metropolis examines the history of nineteenth-century London's "smallpox and fever hospitals" within a broad social and cultural context. It explores the Victorian discourse about contagion and the widely perceived spatial relationships between urbanism and the body. Segregation of the sick from the healthy constitutes an important practice largely neglected by medical history, despite being one of the primary responses to epidemic diseases in the pre-antibiotic age. Especially for Victorian Britain, the infectious disease isolation hospitals occupy a unique place from which to illustrate how metropolitan society saw and experienced the fear of contagion and the anxieties over its containment. The London Fever Hospital, a charitable institution for infectious patients, negotiated the capricious philanthropic environment of late Victorian London by exploiting perceptions of contamination in the domestic sphere. It eventually evolved into an exclusive hospital for paying members of the middle class -- one of the first of the kind -- but also created a new source of stress upon the meanings of charity and public responsibility for community health. A much larger municipal network of "infectious asylums" under the Metropolitan Asylums Board arose in the 1870s out of a perceived need to remove the afflicted poor from epidemiologically explosive slums. Debates that raged over urban isolation provided a focal point for prevalent Victorian discourses about urban modernity, the most important of which were those relating to the rituals of social distancing and the culture of visual display and spectatorship. Isolation fit within a panoply of concerns about private concealment, public exposure, and official representation. For the local state, epidemic hospitals played a crucial role in disease surveillance and control, but for most Londoners they also facilitated the literal and imaginative mapping of the contagious geography of the city.; Fevered Metropolis draws upon a wide variety of medical and popular sources, including records created by hospital administrators, physicians, nurses, and patients; health authority minutes and papers of medical officers; newspaper accounts; government investigations and reports; trial and inquiry testimonies; and proceedings of activist organizations.

FEVERED METROPOLIS:
EPIDEMIC DISEASE AND ISOLATION IN VICTORIAN LONDON.
by
Matthew L. Newsom Kerr
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Matthew L. Newsom Kerr